ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Three Perils of Man — which he ultimately produced as a tale of the borderlands indeed, but definitely no romance — Hogg pulled off a scam not of money but of mutability. It traces the narrative as national through a tale initially romantic but more often perilous — James Hogg’s second title was ‘The Perilous Castles or War, Women and Witchery’. Hogg’s novel plays a game — one too perilous for a Tory Blackwood’s equipped to see the ridiculous only in others, but essential to a nation seeking to live beyond the binarisms of British or class identities. The Three Perils of Man appears to subscribe to the binary narration of the nation. In The Three Perils of Man Hogg foregrounds the issue of the monarch’s recognizability and his consequent representative role.
